1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an automatic performance apparatus and an automatic performance program which enable ensemble performance to be carried out with ease.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, various types of performance apparatuses which enable even a beginning musical instrument player who has no experience of playing a musical instrument to enjoy ensemble performance in an easy way have been developed in the field of electronic musical instruments. For example, there has been proposed a performance apparatus which respectively assigns a plurality of musical instrument parts constituting a piece of music for automatic performance to be carried out based on automatic performance data to a plurality of operating elements, and detects the operative states of the respective operating elements (such as “swinging”, “patting”, and “tilting”) so that volume, tone color, performance tempo, etc. of part tones corresponding to the respective musical instruments can be independently changed (refer to Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication (Kokai) No. 2001-350474, for example).
An operator who operates each operating element can easily control the performance of a part assigned to the operating element by e.g. swinging the operating element, and therefore, even a beginning musical instrument player can feel fulfilled in playing ensemble performance.
In the above conventional performance apparatus, however, the performance of each part is independently controlled through operation by each operator, and hence, for example, if each operator changes the performance tempo (progress) of a part assigned to an operating element according to his/her feeling about the motif of a piece of music, there is a great difference in the progress of performance between a plurality of parts. As a result, the performance of a piece of music composed of a plurality of parts lacks uniformity, and therefore it is impossible to carry out expressive ensemble performance with a sense of uniformity.